I still think about you sometimes.
What you’d say to me now,
what music you’d listen to on the radio.
Who you would have voted for last year,
McCain or Obama?
I think Obama.
I know I barely knew you,
and was far too young to
have any memories with you –
but I still imagine these things,
and others.
I imagine what I’d be like
if you hadn’t died.
I wonder sometimes
if I’d be the same person I am now –
the stubborn liberal,
outspoken even when I know
I’m losing the argument.
I wonder what memories I’d have,
ones that now are filled
with your absence.
My only memory of us
together is in my baby book –
a snapshot of you, in
our house on Wooddrift,
holding my two-week old body and
smiling down at me.
I still think of you that way –
smiling down at me.
Oct 15, 2014
Oct 15, 2014 at 8:49 PM UTC
An artist sketches people passing by,
stopping now and then to take in the scene
of a crowded urban market, the carts and shops
full of trinkets, souvenirs, useless items.
The buildings are ***** years of pollution
painted over storefronts. A cable runs
along the street, weaving in and out
of the tops of the pollution-painted buildings.
A woman puts her cigarette out on the litter-strewn
sidewalk, already plastered with scraps of paper,
bits of garbage. The sun creeps slowly behind
the clouds, shining dully over the street market.
The artist takes this in, captures the dirt,
the decay, and the beauty on paper.
She listens, the sound of sellers
and shoppers fading into a steady hum.
A college student on a bike weaves
in, around, and through the crowd,
braking when he reaches the intersection,
then continuing down the avenue.
The artist flips to a new page,
trying to perfect the emotions of
tourists passing through shops, nervously
buying souvenirs from a foreign vendor.
When she’s finished with this sketch,
she packs up carefully, folding
her notepad shot and then into a bag,
and blends into the street scene.
Oct 15, 2014
Oct 15, 2014 at 8:48 PM UTC
We can’t find each other– it’s
real dark outside,
cool, but not cold.
We will probably regret this by morning, nothing
left but the breath I’m losing. Forget
school; I don’t think I’ll make it home. And when
We have to stop for a breath, her motives
lurk in the air like the cigarette smoke she longs for. It’s 3AM,
late even for us. But
We don’t say much, and look for something to
strike her match with. Now she’s wondering what
“straight” even means as
We share my brother’s hoodie, and
sing anything we can remember. The
sin – or the smoke – dances in the air, but
We can’t tell the difference. This
thin hoodie somehow covers both of us, and I smell
gin or maybe whiskey on her breath.
We have never talked boundaries,
jazz, or those stars engraved on her wrist. I touch one. “Last
June,” she tells me, answering a question I never asked.
We sit for a while. My hand still covers the mark, and she says, “It wasn’t to
die,” but I stay silent, afraid to show her my own faded scars.
Oct 15, 2014
Oct 15, 2014 at 8:47 PM UTC